Why your French still sucks
And why vocabulary is the key to overcoming a language-learning plateau
In my early twenties, I decided to learn German, for no other good reason than seeing the movie Run, Lola, Run, and thinking that the language sounded cool!
I had successfully taught myself English and intermediate-level Spanish, so I was ready for another language. I had been hit by a language-learning fever: this intense desire to learn as many languages as possible in the shortest amount of time.
What I found exciting about learning a difficult language like German is that I had the impression, when I started, that I didn’t understand a single word of it, yet I could project myself in the future to a day when I would indeed understand and speak it. I imagined a life traveling the world, speaking a bunch of languages, and meeting new people in the process. Probably, the desire to impress had something to do with my newfound motivation…
I was very diligent when learning German. Every single day, I worked on an Assimil lesson. I finished the first book, then moved on to the advanced one.
Within a year, I had started reading Harry Potter in German. I took classes at the Goethe Institut, and even paid for private lessons. About a year and a half later, I decided to go to Germany and do a 6-week intensive course at Goethe.
Before leaving, I thought my German was pretty good, and that I would be merely perfecting it. I got confirmation of that belief on the plane, when I understood perfectly what the flight attendant told me in German.
Once in Bonn, I took a placement test, and I was placed in a B1 group.
This was a big disappointment, because I expected to be in a more advanced group.
But I had a secret weapon: thanks to my Internet Marketing work, I knew some people in Germany. I would add additional practice time with them, and not just relying on classes to learn.
When I first got out in the real world, I received my first reality check. In a grocery store, I didn’t understand what the cashier was saying. The people waiting in line behind me made fun of the fact that I didn’t know the word eine Tüte. They repeated aloud, sarcastically and with a thick German accent, “a bag! do you understand?”
In the weeks to come, living in Germany for the first time, I realized the harsh truth: my German wasn’t nearly as good as I thought. I was nowhere near advanced. At best, I was a low-intermediate.
I thought to myself: this is crazy. I’ve put two hours a day into this, for almost two years! That was maybe 700 hours. Little did I know that it would take another 2500 hours or so of German practice, spread very unevenly over the course of the next twenty years, to get to a more decent level, and still not completely fluent.
Why my German sucked
The reason why my German wasn’t as good as I thought was because I had only scratched the surface of what there was to learn. Mainly, I didn’t know enough vocabulary.
German vocabulary was much harder to learn because of the lack of similarities between this language and French. I learned Italian infinitely faster because of those similarities.
Often my students face a similar challenge: they have been learning for a long time and putting a lot of time and effort into this endeavor, but they are disappointed by the results they have achieved.
Or, they reach a plateau, beyond which there is no discernable progress.
To understand why this happens, we’ll need to talk in more detail about vocabulary and comprehension problems.
I’ll be using data from professor Alexander Arguelles, a well-known polyglot, from his talk Extensive Reading and Vocabulary Size, which you can find on YouTube.
Before continuing, did you check out my first French-only newsletter? The best way for you to learn is to read challenging texts, seeking to understand new vocabulary and expressions. Try to read my long-form article in French, along with vocabulary, movie and book recommendations!
What is a word?
How many words do you know in your native language? That’s not an easy question to answer.
First, we must define what a word is.
The easiest way to do this is to count word families, and not every individual word.
Let’s take the example of the word person.
Many other words are related to it:
Personalize
Personally
Personality
Personal
Personify
All of these different words count as one word family. The same goes for conjugated verbs:
Going
To go
She goes
I went
This is one word family.
Research shows that the average native speaker knows 17,000 word families.
If you ponder that for a moment, that’s a lot.
Native speakers with more education might know over 20,000 word families.
How many words do you need to know to speak a language?
By studying the first 3000 word families, you will have a functional level, with a comprehension rate of 90%.
But reading comprehension will start at 8000. 😱
To read fluently and easily, you’ll need close to a native level, so 17,000!
Why 90% comprehension is not enough
The fact that you know 90% of the language when you know 3000 words seems encouraging. You think to yourself, “all I have to do is learn these word families and I’ll be able to understand others and make myself understood.”
In reality, a 90% comprehension level gives you only rough understanding.
For example, this is the first paragraph of Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina, where just a few word families are missing.
As you can tell if you read this paragraph, when just a few key word families are missing, the story doesn’t make much sense. 🧐
According to Dr. Arguelles, you need about 98% comprehension to read and understand with relative ease.
Each new layer of vocabulary is more difficult to acquire
The reason for the plateau is that every thousand word families you learn gets more difficult, as they are less common and therefore, less likely to “stick.”
For example, the first survival layer of vocabulary — the first 3000 word-families — composes 90% of the language, because they are high frequency words.
That means that once you learn one of those words, you’ll also encounter it a lot, and will remember it quickly.
The next level, the next 5000 words, will take much more time.
Finally, the last 7000 words, enough to get you to native level, can take a lifetime.
You cannot learn lists
It’s also useless to learn vocabulary from word lists or vocabulary apps, because the brain only remembers things that are useful and in different contexts.
The only way to learn enough vocabulary to reach a native level is to read a lot in the language, read increasingly longer and more difficult texts, from all sources: newspapers, novels, magazines, blogs, etc.
A teacher cannot teach you the vocabulary you need to learn. It would simply take too long. The role of a teacher is to get you to practice what you know, and help you correct the mistakes you are unknowingly making.
Videos, YouTube, movies, series, podcasts are all effective ways to add more input, but they are not dense enough to get you through the last levels. They will certainly help you acquire the first 3000 words, and solidify your knowledge throughout your journey.
But once you experience that insurmountable plateau, the only way to get past it, other than living full-time in the country (and working full-time in the language, living it every waking hour of the day) is to read… a lot.
When I was at the Goethe Institut for that 6-week course, I asked my teacher what it would take to get from the B level to the C level. She answered, “read German newspapers two hours a day.”
Your goal may not be to reach a super high level, and that’s ok. But you will always improve your level when you grow your vocabulary, and I hope these insights will be useful!
I need your help! This newsletter and website is new, and I’m still working on finding its final title. Please vote on your favorite name for this newsletter:
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Frederic
PS: You can book a private lesson with me here.